Provides an in-depth introduction to debates within post-colonial theory and criticism. The many contributors include Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Anthony Giddens, Anne McClintock, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and bell hooks.

Offers a lucid introduction to postcolonial studies, one of the most important strands in recent literary theory and cultural studies.

This book on post-colonial theory has a wide geographic range and a breadth of historical perspectives. Central to the book is a critique of the very idea of the 'postcolonial' itself.

Emphasising the increasingly regional or national approach to the legacies of colonialism, this Reader provides an entirely new way for students to engage with an important and complex area of discourse.

In sociolinguistic research on Englishes world-wide, little has been published on the pragmatics of postcolonial varieties. This interdisciplinary volume closes this research gap by providing integrative investigations of postcolonial discourses, probing the interstices between linguistic methodologies and literary text analysis. The literary texts under discussion are conceptualized as media both reflecting and creating reality, so that they provide valuable insights into postcolonial discourse phenomena. The contributions deal with the issue of how postcolonial Englishes, such as those spoken in India, Nigeria, South Africa and the Caribbean, have produced different pragmatic conventions in a complex interplay of culture-specific and global linguistic practices. They show the ways in which hybrid communicative situations based on ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity result in similarly hybrid social and communicative routines. The central pragmatic paradigms discussed here include im/politeness, speech act conventions, conversational maxims, deixis, humour, code-switching and -mixing, Othering, and linguistic exclusion.

Through a broad-ranging survey of the allegory, utopia, the historical novel and the epic in post-colonial literature, Jean-Pierre Durix proposes a critical reassessment of the theory of genres. He argues that, in the New Literatures which are often rooted in hybrid aesthetics, the often decried mimesis must be viewed from a completely different angle. Analysing texts by Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant, he pleads for the redefinition of 'magic realism' if the term is to retain generic relevance.

Largely, though not exclusively, as a legacy of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Islamic faith has become synonymous in many corners of the media and academia with violence, which many believe to be its primary mode of expression. The absence of a sophisticated recognition of the wide range of Islamic subjectivities within contemporary culture has created a void in which misinterpretations and hostilities thrive. Responding to the growing importance of religion, specifically Islam, as a cultural signifier in the formation of a postcolonial self, this multidisciplinary collection is organized around contested terms such as secularism, Islamopolitics, female identity, and Islamophobia. The overarching goal of the contributors is to facilitate a deeper understanding of the full range of experiences within Islam as well as the figure of the Muslim, thus enabling a new set of questions about religion’s role in shaping postcolonial identity.